Arts and Crafts Movement

Arts and Crafts Movement,William Morris wallpaper featuring acanthus leaves, c. 1875.The Granger Collection, New YorkA room decorated in the Arts and Crafts style by William Morris, with furniture by Philip Webb.Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, photograph, John WebbEnglish aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century that represented the beginning of a new appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe.

By the 1880s Morris’s efforts had widened the appeal of the Arts and Crafts Movement to a new generation. In 1882 the English architect and designer Arthur H. Mackmurdo helped organize the Century Guild for craftsmen, one of several such groups established about this time. These men revived the art of hand printing and championed the idea that there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists’ ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement.

The main controversy raised by the movement was its practicality in the modern world. The progressives claimed that the movement was trying to turn back the clock and that it could not be done, that the Arts and Crafts Movement could not be taken as practical in mass urban and industrialized society. On the other hand, a reviewer who criticized an 1893 exhibition as “the work of a few for the few” also realized that it represented a graphic protest against design as “a marketable affair, controlled by the salesmen and the advertiser, and at the mercy of every passing fashion.”

Vase (1915) and bowl (1917) produced by the Saturday Evening Girls, a group of women who operated the Paul Revere Pottery in Boston. Paul Revere Pottery is one of the early 20th-century U.S. potteries that exemplifies the American Arts and Crafts movement.PRNewsFoto/Winter Antiques Show/AP ImagesIn the 1890s approval of the Arts and Crafts Movement widened, and the movement became diffused and less specifically identified with a small group of people. Its ideas spread to other countries and became identified with the growing international interest in design, specifically with Art Nouveau.